Women’s Hormones 101: Part 4 – Western Medicine & a Functional Health Path

WOMEN’S HORMONES

WESTERN MEDICINE & A FUNCTIONAL HEALTH PATH 

There is so much more to women’s health and hormones than we’ve been told by the conventionally minded western medical practitioners, big pharma (I know those drug commercials make it look like real fun and games frolicking through the flowers with friends as they recite the known side-effects including those sounding something like this, “May increase the risk of sudden death in some people”), and the for-profit healthcare system (aka the influencers) that propose synthetic pills and/or surgery as the best practice to address a myriad of chronic imbalances, illness, and disease. 

If you take nothing more than this away from this hormone series, please hear me when I say, the path of Western medicine is not designed to remedy the root cause factors contributing to your body-brain imbalances (aka hormones) and the growing number of chronic health conditions plaguing women’s bodies as result, including those 145 labeled autoimmune. If anything, this path has already proven to lead us right into even more unexplained symptoms and more dispensing of drugs that lead to more symptoms, more despair, and more disease the further along this path we women go. 

#TRUTH ABOUT WESTERN MEDICINE

Western medicine works miracles for trauma. I am eternally grateful for this truth – it’s this kind of modern medicine that saved my son’s leg when he was five years old. 

It was like any other summer evening in Texas, people were outside, parents visiting, kids playing, and Bo (my son) was riding his bike on the sidewalk. I’d asked my friend and neighbor Claudeen to keep an eye on him so that I could run inside and grab some water. I wasn’t in the house for ten minutes when Claudeen came in yelling, “Sheila, Bo just got hit with an edger.” As she grabbed towels, I remember running toward the front door wanting to get outside to him but feeling like I was in a tunnel – one I couldn’t get out fastest enough. 

Next door Bo was lying on the sidewalk, his leg being held together by Pat (a neighbor) from across the street; she had seen the whole thing happen. The only thing she said to me was, “Sheila, don’t look.” Today, I know that it was the activation of Pat’s stress hormones adrenaline, norepinephrine, and cortisol that directed the actions of her autonomic nervous system, heightened her awareness to deal quickly with the emergency, and kept her keenly focused on Bo, holding his leg together, telling someone else to call 911, telling Claudeen to grab towels, and me not to look at his injury as I got down on the ground with him. Holding his head in my lap, I focused on his face and reassured him that help was on the way. When the paramedics and firefighters arrived, Pat passed out. No questions, she felt the full force of all those powerful stress hormones pumping. 

Pat is representative of how so many women respond to the needs of others every single day. Her body displayed just what happens with the release of our stress hormones – designed for both our survival and capable of driving us down to the ground when we get too much of this good thing pumping for too long.  She witnessed a situation that called for attention, she ran towards the emergency jumping into action when one of the neighbor boys, Stephen, edger in hand came outside ready to do his chores, didn’t see Bo riding his bike. He couldn’t hear her calling out to him because of his headphones. As Pat gestured to Stephen to take his headphones out, trying to tell him it’s not a good time to edge the lawn with all the kids playing, Bo rode past on the sidewalk just as he picked the edger up off the ground, turned it into the sidewalk, cutting Bo’s quadricep in half and making its way through his knee joint. 

After a month in the hospital, two orthopedic surgeries, and a staph infection that was almost as scary as the trauma itself, Bo was able to come home from the hospital. I remember being oh so thankful for Pat’s responsiveness and modern medicine – the professionals who provided the medical intervention needed, saved Bo’s leg and knee from any permanent damage, and the infectious disease doctors dosed him with the necessary antibiotics to rid his body of the staph infection that threatened more than his leg. 

Much like our stress response system and the hormones it pumps out do work for us, so goes our western medical system and the pills it pumps out in cases of trauma, injury, and acute episodes when the only thing that will save someone’s life and/or limbs is pharmaceutical intervention and/or surgery. 

When it’s not an acute situation, injury, or trauma and we are talking about chronic imbalances, dysfunction, and disease there is another side to the story that the world of western medicine isn’t preparing any one of us for. That is, the unified system of the body, given the right environment (not drugs) has the built-in intelligence to heal itself, rebalance hormones, restore function, and reverse the chronic health conditions many people are experiencing. Let that sink in for a sec. 

Once you choose to turn to your own body system for the help it is designed to give you then it’s time to get your hands on the right lab tests, resources, protocols, and practitioners to help you fix what is wrong and get back to feeling like your best self again. I witnessed it work for thousands and it can work for you too. 

THE (3) MAIN WAYS FUNCTIONAL HEALTH PRACTITIONERS PROVIDE A SIMPLE PATH TO HORMONE BALANCING, SELF-HEALING, AND WHOLE-PERSON WELLNESS. 

1. Finding what foods are right for your body so that it turns down the stress response, balances hormones strengthens immune function, and operates at its highest energetic potential. 
2. Uncovering the hidden healing opportunities with functional lab testing so you can restore balance (aka homeostasis) and build stress resilience. 
3. Teaching people a proven model of holistic care so that they know how to tune into their own body at any point and time and give it exactly what it needs – and eventually, not need functional health practitioners like me anymore.  

#ACTION 

Balancing hormones is the first leg of a proactive and preventative journey to living well, free of chronic health conditions and dis-ease. To balance hormones, you must first command control over your stress response because a body Steeped in Stress will only achieve balance, ease, and high function for so long.  

If you are curious about a functional health path for healing, hormone balancing, and reversing chronic conditions like autoimmune disease, I’d like to invite you to join us for our upcoming Tea & Talk, Tuesday, April 20th, @7 PM CT. Register here.